1980s
In 1982, the company bought the property of The Grange Company and its branch, Valchris Poultry.[4] After this purchase the company re-entered the turkey business and began to produce deli products under the Foster Farms name. By the 1980s, Foster Farms had many new products to offer, such as bologna, poultry franks and luncheon meats.[5] Sales tripled between 1975 and 1988; by 1987, Foster Farms was selling about 140 million chickens per year,[4] making it the largest chicken producer in California. The company's hens laid around 2.2 million eggs per week, which were then transported to hatcheries and kept in an incubator for 18 days.[4] When the chicks hatched, they were taken to different ranches for about 52 days, while they ate the company's own corn and soybean meals. Throughout the 1980s, Foster Farms began to make commercials, with one winning a Clio Award in 1988. By the mid-1980s, their sales had continued to improve, and they expanded again, purchasing Oregon's largest poultry producer, Fircrest Farms in Creswell, in 1987.[4] In 1988, the company leadership decided to increase production capacity.[5] They created a new fryer ranch with one million square feet of poultry housing in Merced, California, upgraded their feed mill in Ceres, California, and built a new 85000 sqft distribution facility and sales office for Northern California in Livingston.[4] In November 1989, Foster Farms obtained a turkey processing plant in Fresno, California, from Roxford Foods. The turkey processing plant was converted into a chicken processing plant; new equipment was added that enabled the plant to process 80 million more chickens a year.
With the discovery that saturated fat intake was linked to heart disease, Americans began to eat less red meat and more chicken.[5] This change dramatically increased sales for Foster Farms. Sales began to drop in 1987, after a report broadcast on the television newsmagazine show 60 Minutes claimed that a high percentage of chicken was infected with salmonella.[6] In response, the company invited the media to visit its processing centers so that customers could see that Foster Farms chickens were not harmful.
